'huge, queer and tawdry' but 'much admired by the public'

So. A little more than two weeks since I posted about anything but the New 52. During which time I have been to see xandratheblue in sexy cabaret, in the pleasingly post-apocalyptic space the Old Vic have constructed in some old tunnels. And to the National Liberal Club, which is exactly the sort of grand old space where I think of London weddings as properly taking place since attending my first as a child, where people I'd not seen since university made me feel at once terribly old and surprisingly young. And paintballing, which I've never done before, and which is strangely fascinating for the way you really do feel the fog of war (and not just from the goggles steaming up on a day that really doesn't feel like October) - you have no idea whether you've hit anyone, or how many people are out there, or of anything much beyond the need to keep shooting and not get shot*. In the final game, having fallen in defence of the President (our stag, who turned out to be paint-bulletproof anyway), I watched from the Dead Zone as two fighters, unsure of each other's exact locations, frantically duelled from behind cover at a distance of maybe four yards, 'death' having granted an appropriately detached and godlike perspective on the conflicts of the living.
Then on to Oxford. Having been to the Other Place, I always thought of Cambridge as simply Oxbridge entire, whereas Oxford is what happens when you attach Oxford to an actual city. But lately I've realised that's not the whole story. Sitting in gentler, more thoroughly English countryside, not the blank, unfinished Fens, Oxford is more truly idyllic. Nor do the winds from the Urals chill it to the bone each winter. I don't know that anyone as thoroughly complacent as a Cameron or a Blair could ever come from somewhere with Cambridge's sharp edges. I think maybe that's been part of the problem these past 15 years. But then, I am of course massively biased.

Anyway: waiting at Paddington to assemble the paintballing party, I saw (though nobody else did) a fat child run past dressed as the Eleventh Doctor. Which confirmed that really, the look is not a good one in and of itself. What to make of the latter half of Season 32? I don't know why, but for me it didn't quite fly. I love the Ponds, and they were the best thing in the final episode, but I felt we got a little too much of them. We got the wrong Cybermen (especially when you've just rewatched The Invasion), defeated too soppily. There have been great images, great performances, great lines - none sadder than simply calling Amelia Pond 'Amy Williams' - but somehow they haven't added up to great Doctor Who, not even with a great Doctor in the lead. But now he's stepped back into the shadows, everything changes again, and I'm still very excited to see what happens next.

*Though this point was elastic. In one game, as attackers, we could respawn. In all games, by the rules of this establishment, head shots didn't count. I assume they wished to discourage head shots, while assuming that pain and startlement would be sufficient disincentives to stop people from willingly getting themselves headshot as a tactical measure. Given I have a very thick skull, and very thick hair, and a fairly high pain threshold, however, I was basically using my head to draw fire.

Lots of films I put off writing up, from the tail end of my Lovefilm trial (like some sort of hippy judge, I always acquit) and elsewhere. Like Berlin Express, a flagwaver about Nazi plotting in the rubble of postwar Berlin. Our Heroes include representatives of the four Allied powers, and the Good Germans - can they all work together to deal with the threat? Of course they can, leading to an ending which I think would have been outdated by the film's 1948 release, and is bleakly hilarious now, where the American and the Russian say friendly farewells in front of their respective compatriots. So with hindsight we know that the heroic Yank nutritionist is going to be ruined by McCarthy, and the stolid but brave Russian will die in Stalin's terror. Oh, and there's a traitor, too. I wouldn't spoiler it but, well, which allied power was best at collaborating with the Nazis? Exactly. They did use the real ruins of Berlin for sets, though, which combined with the voiceover makes some sections practically bombing p0rn. A curiosity rather than a classic.

Unlike Arsenic and Old Lace, which may be the perfect screwball comedy. Well, not quite perfect - the thuggish brother who supposedly looks like Boris Karloff was in fact Raymond Massey, because Karloff was too busy playing the part on Broadway to be in the film. The fool - now most everyone who saw him will have gone to dust, while the rest of the cast are immortal, most particularly Cary Grant who was never more devil-may-care, impossibly elegant even while falling over chairs and otherwise acting the chump. Though even when he disappears for long stretches, the rest of the cast can carry things just fine.

Another brilliant comedy: I'm not sure if The Other Guys even got a cinema release in the UK, in spite of being the fourth full-length Will Ferrell/Adam McKay collaboration, which one would have thought to be Kind Of A Big Deal. If you've seen the others - Anchorman, Talladega Nights, Step Brothers - then yes, this is more of the same. Which is to say, a lot smarter than it looks - an action comedy which is genuinely furious about bank bailouts turning into more bonuses for venal incompetents, which uses its end credits to explain what a Ponzi scheme is and why we've all suffered. The supporting cast is excellent - Samuel L Jackson, Michael Keaton, Steve Coogan, a rather underused Anne Heche - plus the Rock, who plays much the same role he did in Get Smart. Poor sod seems to be such an obvious action hero that he can only get jobs as the joke action hero in the background of films about the other guys overshadowed by the macho cliche.

'Macho cliche' brings us nicely on to Predators, which does exactly what you'd expect and no more. It must be hard being Walton Goggins, though - whoever he plays, it's a joy seeing his character suffer, and a lot of it is just his face. That can't make for easy nights out.

And finally, Pieces of April, one of those almost parodically indie US films about a quirky girl and her family who don't understand. I was only really watching because Stephin Merritt did the soundtrack, but it was pleasant to be reminded what Katie Holmes was like before the Thetans got her, and it does have a minor role for Clay Davis from The Wire - as a domesticated schmuck, which is a bit tricky to process.

Am just returned from my stint as a member of Bill Drummond's The17. Given the whole point of the exercise is to stand apart from recorded music, it would seem unfair to record it here, but to all of you - and especially those who already expressed an interest but whom I couldn't handle herding - I strongly recommed you get in touch and get involved.

Luxembourg did their usual thing of playing their best when the odds were against them, but their set aside, Friday night was not great. So I very much needed the steampunk extravaganza* of Saturday's White Mischief. Such costumes! Moustaches Dali would envy, the goggles of gentlemen engineers, brass-bound jetpacks, silverware become radar dishes, armoured waistcoats. The fairer sex seemed mainly to go for variations on the theme of corsetry, which was as historically justified as it was welcome. Oh, and there was one cove dressed as a giant panda, who provided a handy locational reference if one was trying to find anyone in the British Sea Power crowd. And this was quite the best I've seen BSP, surfing the edge of chaos, dropkicking owls and scaling the balcony, and somehow projecting such concentrated sonic power that the next day, I felt like I must have spent at least some of the evening getting kicked in the midsection. Kunta Kinte also clicked for me, far more so than at the previous White Mischief (and on the whole, the Scala was definitely a much happier venue for the night than Conway Hall**). But to speak only of the headliners would be to misrepresent the wonder of the night - because it was a night, an event, not just a concert with trappings and frills. One could wander happily past dancers and skin-harpists and time-travelling pirates, or stop and stare. It felt, as too few nights feel, like the sort of club one sees in films, the party at the mad nobleman's palace.

There were a lot of poppies about last week; more than the last couple of years, I'm sure. Perhaps it was that ad campaign that did it (although personally I found the poppy ghosts bloody terrifying), but society at large seems to have remembereed that acknowledging a debt of honour to the dead and wounded is not the same thing as expressing an opinion on any particular war. I've even seen them worn unselfconsciously at gigs and clubs, which for the few years previous had seemed very much a Statement. And today, promptly, they're all gone - not dragging on shabbily and gauchely as they sometimes do. Perhaps it helped that the 11th fell on the Sunday this year?
(Odd though it may seem, I think the best piece I've seen on Remembrance Sunday this year was a retrospective on Amiga classic Cannon Fodder. Oh, and while we're on remembrance - I've never read more than the odd article or quote of Norman Mailer, and was always rather put off by his Dave Sim-approved comments on women writers. But this wonderfully honest and non-hagiographic appreciation by Christopher Hitchens makes me reconsider my failure to investigate further, cliche though it is to get into the work of the newly dead)

My contribution to Blog A Penguin Classic, a review of their edition of Henry V, is now online at their site; my initial grand plans were undermined when I spotted the character limit, but that may have been for the best.

Who drinks so much they don't realise they need to pee? And if they do, how come they don't just wet themselves? That always seems to work for the street drinker community. Granted, I am aware of one previous case of someone bursting their bladder rather than letting it out, but that was one of my less illustrious ancestors, who couldn't bear the idea of going for a wee on a train. So yes, OK, the unyielding will of the overly decorous leading to a burst bladder, fair enough. But the debaucheries of Binge Drink Britain (TM)? I find that improbable.

*What music does a steampunk night play? Well, I dressed myself up to the second Dresden Dolls album, and two of the DJs aired tracks from it, so that would be the short answer.
**Which has given me the seeds of a theory on the incompatibility of humanism and burlesque.

People who've yet to see The Wire - are you sick of those who have going on about it? The first episode is legitimately streaming here 'til the end of the week, so you can so easily find out what the fuss is about. Yes, it's about drug dealers, and the first one is free. Anyway, that'll give you some idea of quite why everyone gets so excited about the show, but I've just finished the third season, and dear heavens it gets even better - and, hard as it may be to believe, even more bleak. There are glimmers of light, hope and humanity, for sure - but overall, and especially coming straight from the Potter and Rome conclusions, I feel bloody desolate. If Jacqui Smith really wants new ideas on reducing the harm caused by drugs, she could really not do better than watching these first three series.

Staying with the theme of social collapse, AK47: The Story Of The People's Gun is a deeply frustrating book. Michael Hodges has clearly done his research - meeting General Kalashnikov (and visiting the brothel in the original manufacturing plant), getting shot at in Iraq, interviewing former child soldiers - but fundamentally, he's written articles for Esquire and it shows. He has the glimmerings of a theme - the AK as brand, as revolutionary totem, as a devil which poisons every culture it touches - but he's never quite able to bring them into the light. But just as anyone with an AK is a killing machine (Mikhail Kalashnikov went a lot further than Sam Colt towards making man equal), anyone writing about the AK can terrify you. Reading about the state of Kalashnikov cultures, I found myself looking up and down the Tube thinking, dear heavens, imagine London's nutters and monsters equipped with these. And then the next chapter tells me that in the late nineties there was at least one AK47 in Finsbury Park mosque and it has never been recovered.

Copyright term on sound recordings to remain 50 years because "extending the term could harm Britain's trade balance and provide little practical benefit to artists while hampering creativity and consumers"; ageing musos and industry plutocrats predictably throw toys out of pram.

Do you ever find yourself, and I don't mean when you're without a book or companion, but do you ever find yourself staring out your reflection in the Tube window opposite, wondering what you make of that insolent piece of work who won't look away first?

A London Assembly press release reaches me, its subject: ( Travel arrangements for sporting events – your views wanted )
Notice how they talk about the plight of spectators? About making sports fans' lives easier? Notice how they ask for details of experiences travelling to and from matches? This even though they acknowledge that fans are coming from "far beyond traditional local catchment areas", ie, are not London voters or taxpayers. Whereas the local residents, who have to put up with the transport disruption and the yobbery, are by definition Londoners. So shouldn't it be the residents' views they want at least as much as the sportists'? I have mailed them to this effect; I even astounded myself by avoiding use of the words "footballist", "peon" and "scum", and questioning only the fans' claim on the attentions of London government, rather than their membership of the human race. Who says I can't do moderation?

Have I ever talked about Clifford D. Simak on here before? He was a contemporary of the big names of science fiction's golden age, but somewhere off to one side of them, even though he started out in the same pulps. He could do alien planets, parallel worlds, rocketships, all that business, and do it very well - but what Simak did best was a sort of pastoral science fiction. He sprang from rural Wisconsin, lived among the Mississippi bluffs, spent much of his life as a small-town newspaperman; and it shows. Imagine a sort of science fiction where the obvious lead for the films is Jimmy Stewart, and you've got Simak.
I mention Simak because I recently found a short story collection I don't have in one of Haringey's smaller libraries, and so have been getting new doses of his uniquely warm-hearted, worn-out prose. One of the earlier (and to be honest weaker) stories has a character called Kent Clark; it's copyrighted 1939, the year after Clark Kent made his debut. Wonder if that's just coincidence?

As well as gleefully brutal (anti-)superhero stories, gruelling crime and a certain subset of theologically-based horror, Garth Ennis is probably comics' best writer about war. This is in large part because he's not a cheerleader for either side; one feels that almost anyone who hasn't actually been to war could learn a lot from him. I was reading one of his self-descriptive War Stories last night, 'J For Jenny'. With perfectly bleak and evocative art from David V for Vendetta Lloyd, it shows us a fictional but throughly-researched British bomber crew, and their varying reactions to the raids they're carrying out on the Ruhr valley. Without ever preaching or compromising the believability of its characters, it reminds the hawks that war is a horrible, messy business - and the doves that it is a necessary evil, and one which can bring forth moments of nobility. I'd like to send copies to the extremist NeoCons, and some more to the Stop the War mob - but alas, I doubt any of them have the processing power to follow a decent comic.